Open Educational Resources Degree Initiative

Bunker Hill Community College’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative is enabling the college to enhance its student success agenda by designing and integrating OER into the Liberal Arts Program of Study, which enrolls over 4,000 students annually. The Initiative is developing faculty expertise and driving cultural change within the college around the design and use of OER by focusing on three important goals. The first goal is to reduce the barrier of high textbook costs for students and promote student success by ensuring that students have course materials on the first day of class. A second goal is for faculty to deepen their curricular development and broaden their technological skills by creating fully OER courses in the Liberal Arts major. The Initiative’s final goal is to develop OER that is aligned with our institutional focus on culturally relevant pedagogical practice and community-based learning, which furthers BHCC’s commitment to fostering the success of diverse student populations.

At this time our OER Degree initiative work is on track to exceed our stated grant goals. (See OER Degree Initiative 2017 Annual Report submitted to ATD under separate cover.) By the end of the grant, BHCC will offer at least 80 sections of 40 different courses impacting at least 1,800 students each semester. To date we have engaged three cohorts of faculty which has resulted in 24 faculty trained to develop and use OER, 18 sections offered in spring 2017, 7 sections in summer 2017, 32 sections in fall 2017, and at least 40 sections in spring 2018. A third cohort will participate in a BHCC faculty led 2 day OER workshop in June 2017 which will allow us to offer at least 9 additional sections in spring 2018. Once those courses are fully OER and running we will need only one additional lab science to ensure that a student can complete a fully OER Liberal Arts degree at BHCC. This course will be developed as part of our final cohort which will be selected through a competitive application process in fall 2017 and trained in January 2018.